Outlaws, Elevators, Madlibs

I am back. It has been a while since the last post but that is life. I have a new wrinkle to the weekly visit to the Outlaws. In fact, they were invited to my mother's for dinner on the Sunday to celebrate the birthday of the Lad (the Sunday before was to celebrate the birthday of my nephew, the Lad's cousin, who was born two days before the Lad, but five years later). The betting in our house over Saturday and Sunday afternoon was that they would cancel on my mother, but suprisingly they did not. They did get to my mother's before she got home, though, so some things do not change. I think my father in law has it in his head that time is linear (the Wife does the same thing) and that if he arrives early, he can end the evening early. Either that or he gets so anxious to go and he has no control (bladder, thoughts and anything else) that, like a two year old, he hucks and hucks. My mother in law relents and they arrive early, too early, rudely early, but he feels no sense of being rude since he has become pure Id, in Fruedian terms.

Anyway, they were gone by ten after seven on Sunday. He groused at the way my nephew and neice were playing. My mother in law chided him continuously. He is so afraid of the kids getting hurt. If it were up to him, they would be covered in foam rubber and velcroed to the couch so they could not move, do anything or get hurt. Then again, he would have their mouths taped shut so that he could hear the commercials on television, or he would continually "shush" them, like he does when we are at his place. Of course, I ignore him. What is he going to DO? Nothing!

Anyway, Friday night dinner was uneventful. It was pretty down right boring. We leave a bit after nine and the Lad is looking tired. He is getting a bit whiny too. He and Wife are playing around in the elevator when I try to top them by jumping in the elevator as we were descending. I hit the floor and then the elevator stops. We are stuck between the fifth and sixth floors. Ooooops!

The Lad's first order of business is to panic (I wonder where he gets that from...you will see shortly). He is near tears worried about being stuck "forever" and what if the elevator plummets (we have watched too much "Mythbusters"). This was the add on to his fear of getting older and dying, though I do not think he foresaw himself dying a day after he turned ten. Ain't life a bitch that way?

A moment of reason hits us and we hit the "phone" button on the elevator. We tell the lady we are connected to what the problem is and she tells us to hit the alarm button to alert the super. She is the elevator service dispatch, not on site, and is not much use to us in the immediate sense. The Wife calls her mother on her cell phone to tell her to call down to get the super.

The Wife tells her mother what is up and then hears the phone drop and silence. The first utterance my mother in law makes is "...(the Lad) is NEVER going to want to come here!" No wonder the Lad's first order of business is to panic and default to a worst case scenario, he learned it from the Outlaw family and how they react. I would have smacked my mother in law, if I were not stuck in the elevator.

Anyway, she finally gets a grip, wakes up my father in law (who had gone to bed around eight thirty) to do what I do not know. I am shocked that I did not hear about her trying to ram the elevator door with her shoulder to open it or rappelling down the elevator shaft to rescue us. Anyway, I hear a voice asking us if we are okay. I tell the voice all is well and ask how long a wait we are looking at. I am told twenty minutes. We sit as there is nothing to do but wait. We did have some leftover soup in the elevator with us, so it was no big deal.

The Lad is still a bit nervous and nauseaous. I try to tell him that it is an adventure. We are all together so how bad could it be. At least, we were not stuck on that elevator with strangers, Stinky Guy or the Outlaws. If that were the case, I would have killed my father in law and it would have been justifiable homicide. (Kind of like the drive home from Dayton in early April of 1996, in the snow flurries of western Ontario, I was determined to speed through it so that I could shorten the time I had to spend in an enclosed vehicle with them all or kill us all trying). I told him that this is the first time that I can recall being stuck in an elevator. The Wife told him that she got stuck in an elevator in Las Vegas on one of our trips there.

It is an okay scenario, other than the fact that we all want to be home. Then all of a sudden, the fire alarm light comes on and there is this continuous, loud buzzing/alarm type sound. Now, that is annoying. It is bad enough we are stuck in the elevator but now it is stuck with a buzzing alarm sound that we cannot control. It turns out the super thought he could recall the elevator by turning the "fire" key. OOooooops!

Long story short. Elevator maintenance dude arrives, pries the door open and gets us out. Apparently, all the elevators were offline (they have been replacing the elevators in the building) so it is looking like a coincidence of the jumping and stopping of the elevator. I have to test that one again, but I have promised not to do it with either the Wife or Lad present. I can see their fear, er, point of view.

It took us about 12 minutes to get home from the Outlaws. It was an experience that is all.

Oh yeah, just to give you a sense of my world. The Wife has a hearing problem. She is telling the story, on Sunday, to my sister. My sister asks, "Did you have snacks?" The Wife replies, "No, (the Lad) was there." My sister gives me a look, like what the fuck is she talking about. I mention the soup and look at the Wife and say "What are you talking about?" The Wife says "We did not have sex because (the Lad) was there." I am left to say, "She asked about "snacks" not "sex". "Oh"

I turn to my sister and brother who had just joined us in the kitchen to say, "Welcome to my life." There is some poor communication in this house and it ain't just me. The Wife cannot hear, does not discern context and comes from a family of talkers, not listeners. So the Wife fills in the blanks from her own imagination. A conversation around here is a living version of Mad-libs. Never a dull moment!